Android Honeycomb Designer HATES Task Killers

As Mobilized’s Ina Fried adds another interview with Google executive and lead designer on Android Honeycomb Matias Duarte to her impressive body of work, she gets out of him what he believes to be the truth: “Humans shouldn’t have to do work computers are good at.” He expands by saying that it’s silly to think that a human should have to click a button to save their work in order for it to be saved, and that Advanced Task Killer basically flat out shouldn’t exist.

Duarte lets Fried know that he “takes issue” with the fact that Advanced Task Killer is used by so very many people, saying that Android does a good job of managing memory without the “help” of the user, adding that he’s never had the app installed on any of his devices. Duarte continued by noting the failings of the human brain, “Managing the computing resources, deciding what takes up resident RAM, what takes up resident cycles – this is not a task we should ask humans to do, because, first of all, humans don’t do a very good job of it. They don’t have enough information and enough context.”

Duarte notes that another bit having to do with this topic is the idea that the user should be the one to decide if he or she is interrupted in any of his or her tasks. To accomplish this goal in Honeycomb, he notes, they’ve basically pushed all notifications to one spot [notifications bar, lower left of the screen] and have added “do not disturb” options that allow the user to be bothered by no note.